Caterpillar with Brown Spots and Black Stripe Down Back
After we all went on a bike ride on the trail beside Portage Lake on August 12, 2012, we found this caterpillar crawling on one of our shirts:
This doesn’t quite look like any of the caterpillars in any of my reference books, or on BugGuide.
The best suggestion I got as to what it might be was from John and Jane Balaban, who thought that it looked like a Fall Webworm (Hyphantria cunea) that had lost most of its hair.
If that’s what it is (and the skin color match really is pretty good for that species), the immediate question is what could have made it go bald like that? I can think of several possibilities: (1) It’s a mutant, and never had much hair; (2) It has a disease that made its hair fall out; or (3) It had a run-in with a predator that knocked all of its hair off.
I will probably never know which of those three things happened. Then again, it may yet turn out to not be a fall webworm at all. Any suggestions?
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